BlogBack: Michael Botwinick’s Sixties Flashback to Artists’ Cockroach Installation at the Met

Julia Bryan-Wilson's recent book chronicling the Art Workers Coalition

I'm not the only one having traumatic Sixties flashbacks to the Art Workers Coalition, brought on by the Occupy Museums protest (covered here by Philip Boroff and Katya Kazakina of Bloomberg).

Michael Botwinick, director of the Hudson River Museum, who was the Metropolitan Museum's assistant curator-in-chief (under Ted Rousseau) at the time of the infamous AWC cockroach intervention at a dinner meeting of the Met board's small, very exclusive Acquisitions Committee, disputed certain details in the account (second paragraph) of that incident that I linked to yesterday (summarized from a 2009 book on the AWC by Julia Bryan-Wilson, issued this year in paperback).

Here's Michael's firsthand account of what happened:

Yes indeed, it feels a little like 1968 again. But the acccount of the cockroach incident at the Met that you link to is wrong. It was not a protest of "Harlem on My Mind." That was at the Met in 1969.

The cockroach event took place some two years later in the spring of 1971 after the Met Centennial. It was an Acquisitions Committee meeting, which was held in the Wrightsman Period Rooms. It was on an evening the Museum was open. The AWC used whistles to confuse security and came in past the flimsy folding screens.

This was before walkie talkies, and the guards at the Met used a whistle signal system to communicate in emergencies. It was always assumed someone on the staff had tipped them off about the system and the dinner.

That small glitch doesn't take away from the real point of your post. But it is worth remembering that what pushed the AWC and others into confrontation with the Met was [director Tom] Hoving's Master Plan and the encroachment into Central Park---seems a little quaint now. This was distinct from the PASTA/MoMA strike [a job action by unionized employees of the Museum of Modern Art], which had a much stronger focus on workers' rights.

I am fairly sure of my facts. That was the first Acquisition Meeting I organized. It is a night I am not likely to forget.

Then again, another person who was "not likely to forget," Tom Hoving, in his directorial memoir, Making the Mummies Dance, suggested that this incident was related to an ongoing labor dispute with museum employees. Yet another account says the invading artists were "protesting the spirit of acquisition" at the museum.

Far out! Does anyone really remember the Sixties?